Arlen Specter

Snarlin’ no more

The fine, lost art of independent congressional thinking

NEITHER Democrats nor Republicans have much love for moderates in their ranks. The reason is simple: in America’s two-party system, moderation tends to mean siding with the other guys. One man’s judicious independent is another’s unreliable traitor.

Yet a politician’s ability to defy his own party is, on balance, a valuable trait (for the country, if not the party), and it is one that Arlen Specter often displayed. Mr Specter, who succumbed to lymphoma at the age of 82 on October 14th, represented Pennsylvania in the Senate for five terms—longer than any other Pennsylvania senator. The son of an American mother and a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant father who served in the first world war and sold fruit and scrap in Russell, Kansas (the same town that produced Bob Dole), Mr Specter attended the University of Pennsylvania and Yale Law School before prosecuting municipal corruption as an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia.

In 1965 he won his first-ever electoral victory, for district attorney of Philadelphia, as a Republican, even though he was a registered Democrat at the time. He switched parties shortly thereafter, to little avail: he claims that Republican leaders blocked his bid to be governor in 1970, and that he won his party’s nomination for Senate in 1980 over internal opposition.

In the Senate he bucked his own party and the president by opposing the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, saying he had “substantial doubt about Judge Bork’s application of [the] fundamental legal principle” of equal protection. During Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings Mr Specter cited Scottish law to vote “not proven”, thus freeing himself from having to vote either guilty or not guilty.

Yet Mr Specter was an equal-opportunity thorn: he annoyed Democrats when he subjected Anita Hill, who had accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, to intense questioning during Mr Thomas’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. Mr Specter was a rare pro-choice Republican, who as late as 2008 received a 100% rating on his voting record from NARAL Pro-Choice America; no doubt many expected him to take Ms Hill’s side, or at least not interrogate her so aggressively (not for nothing was he nicknamed “Snarlin’ Arlen”).

But as the Republican Party tacked right, it left him behind. In 2009, facing a primary challenge from Pat Toomey, an orthodox right-winger, Mr Specter switched parties again. The next year he lost the Democratic Senate primary to Joe Sestak, ending his political career.

No doubt Republicans in Congress prefer a good soldier such as Mr Toomey to a prickly independent such as Mr Specter. And Democrats similarly seem to be going to no great lengths to rescue vulnerable members of their shrinking Blue Dog caucus of conservative Democrats. Parties’ tents are growing smaller, and redistricting is reducing the number of seats decided in inter-party general elections. Result: permanent gridlock.